Publications
Journal and conference papers
- Pan, Z., Liu R., Guo, L., Ye, C. (2024) The Effect of Interference on Retro-cue Benefit in Visual Working Memory. Journal of Sichuan Normal University (Natural Science),47(02):179-187.
Abstract The visual working memory capacity is limited, and the task-related visual information must be selected by attention for encoding and maintenance. Retro-cues guide internal attention to selectively focus on relevant mental representations in visual working memory.Memory representations cued by retro-cues show both qualitative and quantitative improvements compared to uncued representation, a phenomenon known as retro-cue benefit.Many researchers have used retro-cue paradigms with change detection tasks or recall tasks to examine the impact of interference on retro-cue benefit, but the conclusions in this area are still controversial. This paper mainly reviews previous studies, and puts forward four possible influencing factors (interference type, interference source, timing of interference, and cue type) to explain the reasons for the different results of previous studies, and develop a cognitive model of how interference affects retro-cue benefit.
- Ye, C., Xu, Q., Pan, Z., Nie, Q.-Y., & Liu, Q. (2024). The differential impact of face distractors on visual working memory across encoding and delay stages. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 86(6), 2029–2041.
- Abstract External distractions often occur when information must be retained in visual working memory (VWM)—a crucial element in cognitive processing and everyday activities. However, the distraction effects can differ if they occur during the encoding rather than the delay stages. Previous research on these effects used simple stimuli (e.g., color and orientation) rather than considering distractions caused by real-world stimuli on VWM. In the present study, participants performed a facial VWM task under different distraction conditions across the encoding and delay stages to elucidate the mechanisms of distraction resistance in the context of complex real-world stimuli. VWM performance was significantly impaired by delay-stage but not encoding-stage distractors (Experiment 1). In addition, the delay distraction effect arose primarily due to the absence of distractor process at the encoding stage rather than the presence of a distractor during the delay stage (Experiment 2). Finally, the impairment in the delay-distraction condition was not due to the abrupt appearance of distractors (Experiment 3). Taken together, these findings indicate that the processing mechanisms previously established for resisting distractions in VWM using simple stimuli can be extended to more complex real-world stimuli, such as faces.